Hans im Gluck
Reiner Knizia
2-5 players/90 minutes
As usual, it seems like the introduction of a new Knizia
game is being greeted with some mixed feelings. How many auction games can he
sell us? Can it really be somthing new? Hasn't he done it all yet?
Personally, I was impressed with Knizia's newest release, Amun-Re. This
criticism Knizia sometimes gets for endlessly re-using similar mechanisms may
not be entirely unfair in his small-box stuff (to which I am generally
lukewarm), but in his larger games, appearances can be decieving. True, you
wouldn't mistake this for a game from any other designer - Amun-Re is an
auction game, sort of, with a variety of contradictory ways to score points,
but it is very different from his previous games in a variety of ways.
The general idea is that you want to build pyramids. There are really two
auctions involved: first the auctioning of building sites, each of which comes
with a different set of "infrastructure": mainly farmland (for installing
farmers which will generate income) and trade routes (which provide a
more-or-less fixed income). The auction mechanism is interestingly unusual, but
boils down mainly to the fact that you have increase your bids geometrically to
outbid previous players, and you have to bid carefully because if you are
overbid, you can't immediately come back and bid on the same property again.
Players then purchase not only building blocks which they can turn into
pyramids (whose only function is to earn VPs), but also farmers (to generate
money later) and power cards (which provide various special actions, including
granting VPs if your building sites are arrayed in various specific
permutations a la Princes of Florence prestige cards).
Once this is done, there is another "harvest" auction (this one a standard "in
the fist" with a minor tweak) in which a few more blocks, cards, and farmers
are up for grabs. The interesting thing about this auction is that the higher
the bidding goes, the more farmers will pay off in the following income phase
and the less some of the fixed-income properties will pay. The difference can
be huge; a low bid and the farmers will pay only 1, quite probably not enough
to cover their cost; a high bid and they can pay 3-4, which is a considerable
windfall if you've invested in them. As with many Knizia games, the key seems
to be not to be too far against the grain; if you build too many farmers and
everyone else doesn't, yours will likely not pay much.
After recieving income, you do the property auction/building/harvest cycle
twice more before scoring. Then things get really interesting; everything on
the board gets cleared off except for the pyramids, and you start (almost) from
scratch again; so if you build aggressively in the first round, but didn't save
any money, someone else may likely benefit from all the pyramids you
laboriously constructed in the first round.
Despite an ongoing 8-year process of becoming slightly jaded about new euro
games, I quite liked Amun-Re. It is definitely a well-executed, more
substantial game, something we've been in desperate need of since burnout on
Puerto Rico has set in (and somthing of which the Europeans seem to be
producing fewer of late). Taken as a whole, it's definitely a very different
game, quite distinct from previous Knizia games. Although the mechanism is
unique, the auctions will still feel vaguely familiar, but Amun-Re definitely
has a kingdom-building and economic feel that is unusual in Knizia's games. The
halftime clearing of the board is a nice touch too, as it cuts into the runaway
leader problem that more economic games usually have. And the "harvest" auction
which both allocates resources and sets various income levels is clever, I
thought.
All in all, a lot to like and fans of Knizia's bigger games should be quite
happy, for a little while anyway.
© Chris Farrell
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